Sharing A Printer Using Vista

Fix a network printer suddenly showing as offline in Windows Vista, 7 or 8 « Robin's Blog. July 3, 2. 01. 1This post has become quite popular – so I’ve updated it with a bit more detail, plus some people’s experiences from the comments. If you find it useful then please leave a comment – or, even better, if I’ve saved you time and money then donate a bit to cover my hosting costs.

You may find, as I have done recently, that a network printer installed on a Windows Vista starts suddenly showing as Offline even when other machines on the network can access it fine. I originally thought it would be an IP address issue, but it turned out not to be anything to do with that.

Back when Vista was the hot topic, we wrote an article on how to network Vista and XP computers together. Now we have another Windows version Sharing Printers over the Internet. Another advanced printer sharing topic we'll discuss is printing over the Internet. We'll configure Windows to securely share a. Robin's Blog How to: Fix a network printer suddenly showing as offline in Windows Vista, 7 or 8 July 3, 2011. This post has become quite popular – so I’ve updated.

In fact, the solution was far simpler – but also slightly strange. SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol and is a way of getting information from network devices (such as routers, servers and printers), mainly for the purposes of finding out if there are any problems with the devices. A number of networked printers implement SNMP, and will respond to SNMP queries with information, but some don’t. My printer (a fairly old Lexmark T6.

Vista will never get a response to a SNMP message. The result of which is that the printer will start showing as offline at a seemingly random time because Vista has just sent a SNMP message to it, and it hasn’t responded. Thankfully there is a simple way to fix this – and it just involves telling Vista not to try and communicate with the printer via SNMP. Simply right- click on the printer in the Printers window, choose the Ports tab, and select Configure Port.

At the bottom you will see a checkbox saying something like SNMP Status Enable. Untick that, and the printer should start showing as online again.

The Security Options section of Group Policy configures computer security settings for digital data signatures, Administrator and Guest account names, access to. Configuring file and printer sharing behavior in Windows Vista consists of the following. Although this guide is for native Windows tools, those using Windows XP and Windows Vista and looking for a similar tool can use Utility Spotlight from TechNet.

That should be it.